Critic Reviews

Like Water for Chocolate creates its own intense world of passion and romance, and adds a little comedy and a lot of quail, garlic, honey, chiles, mole, cilantro, rose petals and corn meal.

The title may be a mouthful but Like Water for Chocolate is a feast for the soul. Hauntingly and exquisitely prepared, this Mexican adult fairy tale is garnished with mystery and wonder.

Though much of Like Water For Chocolate simmers with humor and the stumbling plight of human life, the movie takes its soul from deeper strains -- unfulfilled longing, the tyranny of social customs in a macho-dominated world, and the final outrage that love and death are inseparable, often indistinguishable companions. [26 Mar 1993, p.C1]

Overtly passionate, ebulliently funny and ideologically subtle, Like Water for Chocolate is strong drink - hot and sweet. It toasts life not as it is but as it should be. [09 Apr 1993]

Director Alphonso Arau directs this adaptation of the Laura Esquivel novel with a light touch, even in the film's most bizarre twists and passionate turns. [07 May 1993, p.8]

Food and passion create a sublime alchemy in Like Water for Chocolate, a Mexican film whose characters experience life so intensely that they sometimes literally smolder.

This delicious, mystical Mexican drama keeps you in an almost constant state of stimulation. [11 June 1993, p.28]

Like Water for Chocolate, a simmering cauldron of romance and revolution, passion and purity, mysticism and witticism, is a powerful and heady brew.

The simplicity of Like Water for Chocolate - a Mexican expression for the boiling point - is that of a sophisticated hand paring away all excess until what's left is primal, elemental. In Esquivel's and Arau's fabulist hands, it's the hand that tends the cookfire that rules the world. [19 Mar 1993, p.50]

A delightfully robust fable about two passions that matter (sex and food). [17 May 1993, p.4D]